portraiture

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In the visual arts, a work of art about a person. Often portraits are intended to create a likeness of someone; others, such as some portraits by Picasso, may not look like the model, but are the artist's interpretation of the whole person. Portraits appear in many ancient cultures, but first flourished in the West in ancient Rome when statues, coins, and medallions of the rich and the powerful were produced. The portrait complete in itself, commissioned as a celebration of status and for the purposes of remembrance, was produced both in Italy and the Netherlands from the 15th century, and became particularly popular in 18th-century England. Before the invention of photography, portable portraiture in the form of a miniature painting, often worn as jewellery, became a strong tradition in England and France. Self-portraits, by artists such as Rembrandt and Frida Kahlo, are also considered a type of portraiture.

The subject of a portrait can appear at different angles: profile, front view, or three-quarters view. A profile is a side view of a face. Profiles have been used on coins and medallions since ancient times, and were favoured by Italian Renaissance painters of the 14th and 15th centuries, as seen in Pisanello's Ginepor d'Est (c. 1440; Musée de Louvre, Paris). A front view looks straight at the model. The face is symmetrically balanced, as in Filippino Lippi's Portrait of a Youth (c. 1485; National Gallery of Art, Washington). In a three-quarters view the head is partly turned, the result being half way between a front view and a profile, as in Andrea del Sarto's Portrait of a Young Man (c. 1520–25; National Gallery, London).

Development
In Egypt in the 3rd century AD, portraits painted in wax on the panels of mummy cases achieved a high degree of realism. Portraiture virtually disappeared in the West after the fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th century AD, but revived in the 14th century as patrons and donors began to appear in religious pictures.

In the early 15th century oil paint was introduced as an artistic medium, and soon supplanted the use of tempera as the preferred medium. Its flexibility and luminosity allowed artists to create more realistic likenesses, as seen in Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa (c. 1503–06; Louvre, Paris). Portraiture began to flourish.

After the Reformation in Europe in the 16th century, religious painting declined, and secular (non-religious) subjects gained in importance. Portraiture in particular had a special importance as a reflection of status. In Europe monarchies became more settled and painters became a regular sight in royal courts and palaces. In the 16th and 17th centuries Hans Holbein the Younger, Rembrandt, Diego Velázquez, Peter Paul Rubens, and Anthony van Dyck were particularly noted for their portraiture, while Nicholas Hilliard and Isaac Oliver were sought after for their miniatures.

In the 18th century portraiture reached the height of its popularity in England where William Hogarth, Thomas Gainsborough, Joshua Reynolds, George Romney, Allan Ramsay, Henry Raeburn, Thomas Lawrence, and others found favour. The intimate ‘conversation piece’, a representation of figures in familiar groupings, was favoured during this period.

Decline of portraiture
With the invention of photography in the 19th century, portraiture began to decline. Artists' ideas about art were also beginning to change, as they became less interested in creating a realistic likeness of someone, and more interested in giving an atmospheric impression of the sitter – the portraits of Paul Cézanne being an instance.

However, the tradition of portraiture was maintained in the 20th century by artists such as John Singer Sargent, who brilliantly depicted affluent late Victorian and Edwardian society, Augustus John, and Wiliam Orpen. Other artists produced portraits in a more modern vein, for example Graham Sutherland, Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, and David Hockney. Artists who broke further away from the conventional idea of portraiture included Marc Quinn, whose Self (1991; Saatchi Collection, London) is a cast of his head made from his own frozen blood (it is displayed in a refrigerated cabinet).

Self-portraits
The self-portrait, a painting of the artist's own face, appeared during the Renaissance. Until this period, artists were regarded as little more than decorators, but during the Renaissance both their status and their individualism grew rapidly. One of the first examples of a self-portrait is believed to be Jan van Eyck's Man in a Red Turban (c. 1433; National Gallery, London). Other impressive examples are Dürer's Self-portrait with Gloves (1493; Louvre, Paris), Rembrandt's Self-portrait (c. 1659; National Gallery of Art, Washington), Vincent van Gogh's Self-portrait with Bandaged Ear (1889; Courtauld Institute Gallery, London), and Frida Kahlo's autobiographical paintings. The genre remains popular today.

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